Let’s do the Oscar wrap-up first.

I predicted most of the top awards, including Best Picture, Best Actor and Actress, Best Supporting Actor, and both Best Screenplay awards. I was, of course, most surprised and elated that Cameron Crowe came away with the Best Original Screenplay award. It’s about time one of the best writer-directors working today gets recognized, at least for half of his talents.

I was also surprised that Soderbergh won Best Director for Traffic, and that led me to a few moments’ faint hope that Gladiator wouldn’t claim Best Picture. Both Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Traffic were far superior films, I thought, and Traffic should have walked away with the top prize.

Steve Martin’s best line: “If Tom Hanks wins tonight, that means between the two of us, we’ll have a combined three Oscars!”

Of course, these awards don’t mean anything, but as it’s the last major awards show of the year, and I get off on awards shows for some reason, I had to touch on it. I’m done now. Really.

There have been a few really cool CD releases over the past few weeks, like Sepultura’s Nation and Shawn Colvin’s Whole New You. I’m not going to discuss them yet. I also finally got my hands on Amy Ray’s solo album, Stag, and it’s terrific, in its small and surprising way. I’m not going to talk about that, either. Instead, I’m going to use this platform I have to hopefully shine the light of exposure on a disc (two, actually) that hasn’t been more than two feet away from my CD player since I got it two weeks ago. It’s not exactly new, but it may as well be, and it’s probably unavailable in your local record store. Hence, I hope, with the following words, to inspire you all to hunt it down and check it out.

It’s called It’s For You, and it’s a live album by Michael Roe.

In order for me to tell you about Michael Roe, I’m going to have to tell you about his band, the Seventy Sevens. These guys rock. They have nine albums, counting the new collection, Late, and their tenth, A Golden Field of Radioactive Crows, should be released sometime in May. The Seventy Sevens have languished on small labels for their entire terrific career, a career that spans almost 20 years. They were once thought of as the Next Big Thing, and signed to Island in 1987. Their self-titled third album, known to fans as the Island album, came out mere weeks before U2’s The Joshua Tree, and since U2 was also on Island, you can guess what happened.

The Island album was just the beginning of the band’s artistic ascent, though. In 1992 they put out a mostly acoustic stunner called Pray Naked (a title the label forced them to remove), and they really haven’t looked back since. The follow-ups, Drowning With Land in Sight and Tom Tom Blues, were equally magnificent. Drowning was heavy and dark, and Blues had the feel of one of the greatest bands on Earth just jamming for a weekend.

Not that the Seventy Sevens are one of the greatest bands on Earth. They’re just one of the most consistent, and the driving force behind their sometimes progressive, sometimes acoustic, sometimes bluesy rock is lead singer, guitarist and songwriter Michael Roe. First off, the man can sing. He’s got a great range, and he invests everything with a genuine feeling that can’t be faked. (Bruce Springsteen, for example, tries to fake it.) Second, the man can play guitar. Acoustic, electric, whatever, the man can play, and in a variety of styles. On Pray Naked, for example, he slips from the Led Zeppelin-esque power of “Woody” to the acoustic pop of “Phony Eyes,” and it sounds like you’ve just changed channels on your radio dial. Third, the man can write a song. If you’re a Seventy Sevens fan, you’ve probably tried to stop humming “Happy Roy” or “The Jig is Up” or any number of other great pop songs Roe’s penned. Roe has also had two great solo albums, Safe as Milk and the cheekily titled The Boat Ashore. (Say his name, then the album title.)

In 1998, while on one of his many solo breaks from the Seventy Sevens (and his other band, the great Lost Dogs, but that’s a whole other column), Roe, broke and desperate, came up with a novel idea. He’d contact his small yet loyal network of fans and do an acoustic tour. He’d play wherever people wanted him to, as long as they could pay his miniscule fee and put him and the band up for the night. Plus, he’d let the fans pick the songs on the night of the show. He booked enough of these things to call it a tour, called Seventy Sevens guitarist David Leonhardt, bassist Mark Harmon and drummer Brian Meyers, and hit the road.

The result is captured on It’s For You, named after a song on Safe as Milk. If you’ve never tried Michael Roe’s music before, this 140-minute set is a near-perfect introduction. The songs really shine in these acoustic renditions, and there’s a lot of them (29 in all), from every phase of the man’s career. Plus, the laid-back atmosphere of the disc makes this one of the most enjoyable of Roe’s projects. He finishes the second song, “MT,” and then announces, “That’s the prepared portion of our program,” and he’s not kidding. Just about every song on disc one is preceded by an audible request from the audience.

The first disc is the more spontaneous of the two, filled with covers and off-the-cuff renditions of favorites. Roe’s version of “Nobody’s Fault but Mine” shies away from the Led Zeppelin rewrite and instead recalls the original Blind Willie Johnson blues version. A fan asks for “King of the Road,” for some reason, and a game Roe spins the first verse, commenting, “No request will go unconsidered.” He does a heartrending take on “The Jig is Up,” one of his best love songs, and two songs later he’s mocking himself mercilessly, fumbling through an acoustic re-arrangement of the Ozzy-esque “Snake.” (Trust me, even if you’ve never heard the original, this new take is a gas.)

Disc two is the superior one, though, centering more on performance and musicianship. The thing with acoustic shows is that there’s nowhere to hide if you suck. That’s why the best performers shine acoustically. Roe definitely doesn’t need to hide, and this second disc proves it indisputably with a stretch of seven pure acoustic readings of some of his best works.

First, though, you’re treated to a trio of awe-inspiring electric blues pieces – “Perfect Blues,” “Nuts for You” and “John Lee’s Blues.” Roe’s extended solo on “Nuts” is breathtaking, and it helps that it’s a great song as well. It has nothing, however, on the sweet seven tunes that close out It’s For You. Most notably, Roe’s voice takes on new dimension in “I Need God,” a soaring gospel number. “Do It For Love” is soulful and invigorating, and the closer, “Ache Beautiful,” is simply lovely.

As I said earlier, this hasn’t left the vicinity of my CD player in two weeks. To get similarly afflicted, you should log onto www.77s.com. There’s info there on each Seventy Sevens release, including the new one, and links to purchase each album directly from the band. It’s For You is highly recommended, of course, as is Pray Naked, Tom Tom Blues, Safe as Milk… hell, anything Roe’s done. I sing this song a lot, but it’s a shame he isn’t more well-known.

One last thing I want to mention. Roland Orzabal, he of Tears for Fears fame, has a solo album called Tomcats Screaming Outside. You can’t get it in American record stores, and you most likely will never be able to. There is hope, though. If you log onto www.rolandorzabal.co.uk, you can order it. Shipping overseas takes a while, but probably less time than waiting for Orzabal’s U.S. record deal to materialize.

Next time… well, if you still have last week’s column, you can cut and paste the last paragraph to the end of this week’s missive and it’ll still be true.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

Ladies and gentlemen…

Announcing the grand opening of the big ol’ website that houses this here column. It’s up and running (which doesn’t necessarily mean up to date) at www.tm3am.com. The site will get updated very soon, but for now everything from February 14 backward is online. Check it out, and then e-mail Mike Ferrier and tell him what a great job he did. His address is at the bottom of the “New Readers” page.

This doesn’t mean I won’t continue to e-mail the column to all of you. Once a week, this beast should show up in your e-mailbox, unless I suddenly die or something. So fear not.

Anywho, last week, if you remember, I mentioned that I wanted to take some time and collect my thoughts on Semisonic’s All About Chemistry. Well, I’m glad I waited a week. Buckle up…

One of 1998’s biggest surprises was the quality of Semisonic’s second album, Feeling Strangely Fine. This trio rose from the ashes of rightly-ignored pop group Trip Shakespeare in 1996 to release Great Divide, a trite mess of an album that bombed like Nagasaki. The strange thing about Great Divide was that it was obvious how much the record company was behind this group. The album was a production, with big guitars and a multi-hundred-thousand-dollar sound. It spawned a semi-hit (“Delicious”) and died on the vine.

A second album seemed iffy, but somehow Semisonic put one together. The strange thing about Feeling Strangely Fine was that it was also obvious how little the record company was behind them. This little record was made for, like, a hundred bucks, and it often sounds that way. Miraculously, though, the lack of production brought out the honesty in Dan Wilson’s songs. Feeling Strangely Fine was a modern pop album that played like a confessional folk album, with resonant songs that won you over in spite of themselves. Oddly, it spawned two huge hits, “Closing Time” and “Singing in My Sleep,” and sold like naked pictures of Jeri Ryan at a Star Trek convention.

There seemed to be a pattern forming, and a disturbing one at that. When Semisonic has no money, they make great records. When they have a big budget, they overindulge and make poo-poo. Does the third album bear this out?

Sort of.

It’s important to note that All About Chemistry is the biggest-sounding album these guys have ever made, both as Semisonic and as Trip Shakespeare. This thing is huge, layered, and sonically massive. I was all set to pan the hell out of it last week, but a few more listens tipped me off to what they were doing. I think All About Chemistry is Semisonic’s attempt at a tribute album to the last 40 years of pop music.

And believe me, brother, this thing is pure pop. I haven’t heard an album this purely pop in many a moon. It reminds me, in its multiple-personality way, of nothing so much as a latter-period Queen album. The Works springs immediately to mind, as does The Game. Wilson, John Munson and Jacob Slichter have too much love for all forms of pop to confine themselves to one style, or even a couple of styles. Every song is utterly different from every other song. Oh, and none of the songs sound anything like Feeling Strangely Fine.

Queen made a career out of albums that sound like mix tapes, so there is a decent precedent. For Semisonic, this feels like expensive career suicide. What saves the album is the group’s obvious joy at producing this stuff. My first couple of stabs at a review tried to sum it all up, to take it all in as a whole. Can’t be done. I’ve decided the only way I can accurately describe All About Chemistry is one song at a time. Besides, the band put so much work into each tune here that they all deserve their own review anyway. Here goes:

I’ve had the longest amount of time to deal with this one. I first downloaded it from Napster more than a month ago. It’s been described by others as a great lost Hall & Oates single, but I think it’s better than that. To me, this tune sounds like Todd Rundgren at his cheeky best. The rhythm is carried by lovely repeating piano chords, the guitar has a nifty melody that rests atop them, and the lyrics tread that fine line between stupid and clever that Nigel Tufnel was talking about. It even contains a great “Oh-oh-oh-o-o-ooh” lead-out from the chorus. This is a quintessential pop song, but then, there’s a lot of those on here.

Now, this one sounds like Hall & Oates, but only if they were complete assholes. Wilson gets in touch with his inner bastard in this paean to physical relationships. “If you think I’m asking too much, we can stay in touch and I’ll find someone else to bed.” That’s right, it’s “bed” in its rarely-used verb form. Musically, it’s pure ‘80s blue-eyed soul. This may as well be the backing track to “Maneater.”

From Hall & Oates to Chris DeBurgh. “Act Naturally” is a synth ballad that sounds an awful lot like DeBurgh’s “The Lady in Red,” or, for that matter, any one of a number of Phil Collins songs that also sound like “The Lady in Red.” There are no guitars in this song, the drums are minimalist and programmed, and the synth washes are the instrumentation. That’s not to say this doesn’t work. As a keyboard-driven pop ballad, it’s great. Wilson’s lyrics here start to show signs of the same multiple personality disorder that affects the album. Coming right off the harsh “Bed,” “Act Naturally” is a plea for his lover to keep their troubled relationship hidden from the public. “’Till we get it figured out, don’t give them anything that they can doubt…” It’s hard to feel sorry for him after his turn as an ass in the last song.

The pop epic. All the trappings are here, from the cascading pianos to the lovely minor chords to the huge orchestrated finale. Like the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life,” it manages to be gigantic in scope and yet under six minutes in length. This is one of my favorites.

If you have an aversion to pop cliches, I’d get out now. Dig the chorus lyrics: “Take me wherever you go, make me forget tomorrow, love me the best that you know, all of the rest will follow.” In the wrong hands, that smells like week-old limburger. It’s a good thing, then, that it didn’t fall into the wrong hands. Wilson sets this sentimental claptrap against a breezy, James Taylor-in-a-good-mood guitar line that’s no less cliched, but together the lyrics and music seem to click. This is another quintessential pop song, the kind the Gin Blossoms tried to write 20-some-odd times.

I hope Jeff Lynne hears this, and I hope he’s amused enough not to sue. “Sunshine and Chocolate” may as well be one of the hundreds of songs Lynne has produced, both with Electric Light Orchestra and otherwise. They even got the chirpy lead guitar sound down perfectly. The song isn’t too bad either.

Another mean-sounding one, but when you’re trying to sound like Steely Dan, mean comes with the territory. Adding to the disassociated feel is John Munson’s one turn at lead vocals. (He does one an album, usually.) This one has hints of the Beatles in it as well, but the lyrics (about a man kicking his dependent lover out) are pure Becker and Fagen.

This monster is the group’s homage to garage-pop. It’s bare compared to the rest of the album – just guitars, bass, drums and vocals – and it sounds an awful lot like Aimee Mann’s “Par for the Course.” This tune is also Wilson’s opportunity to trot out the most durable of pop cliches, the “highest-mountain-deepest-sea” lyric. No kidding, it goes like this: “I’d swim the high seas for you, get down on my knees for you, swing from the trees for you…” They pull out of this tailspin by appending a three-minute searing guitar solo to the ending, which is really worth it.

Get this. “One True Love” is not only a perfect sad-sack lonely-in-love ballad, it’s also a collaboration with Carole King, who co-wrote, sings and plays piano. Carole King! She’s almost a pop cliche by herself, but the tune is sweet, and her voice fits right in. Where has she been?

Ah, the pop novelty song. This is, of course, a long-standing tradition dating back before the Chipmunks, and one that survives to this day. (See Eiffel 65’s “Blue,” or the A*Teens’ cover of “Dancing Queen.”) “Get a Grip” is, of course, about masturbation: “Get a grip on yourself, you know you should/Get a grip on yourself, it sure feels good.” It’s set to a bouncy pop-punk backbeat, and it’s three minutes of fluffy fun. Its message, as well, cannot be overstated…

The album’s one tip of the hat to modern pop-rock, a la Everclear (especially volume one of Songs from an American Movie). They turn the genre on its ear, though, by infusing “Surprise” with winningly optimistic lyrics: “I’m gonna surprise them all when they look and I’m gone, gone, gone…” This is the one tune here that might be a hit.

Elton John has always ended his albums with a simple, big-sounding epic that serves as a curtain call. (He even called one of them “Curtains,” from Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy.) “El Matador” is one of those, an absurdly simple pop song that builds in orchestration and intensity until its crescendo of a conclusion. It’s a plaintive plea for someone to “stay a while,” which makes for a fitting last song. It’s all piano, acoustic guitar and orchestra.

I’ve spent an awful lot of time on this effervescent little creation, but then, the band spent an awful lot more time on it than I did. All About Chemistry is surprisingly ambitious for an album that’s as disposable as a paper towel, and for all its hugeness, it fails to connect in even the simplest ways. Semisonic’s traded emotional resonance for sonic resonance, and even though I like them both in different ways, I’d have to recommend Feeling Strangely Fine over this one. There’s something so direct about that album that gets lost here in layers of sound.

Still, All About Chemistry isn’t bad for what it is. If you were a Queen fan, you might even find it suits you perfectly. Me, I’m sort of looking forward to it falling off the sales charts, so that Semisonic can go back to miniscule budgets, smaller concepts and the simple, perfect music they did so well last time out.

Next week, depending on how I feel, either Sepultura or Shawn Colvin. Also on the horizon is Celtic prog band Iona’s new Open Sky. I might listen to all three in a row. It’s neat being me.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

Almost Famous is out on video and DVD. Go rent it if you haven’t seen it. If you don’t like it, I mean really don’t like it, e-mail me and I will personally go to your house and give you 50 bucks.

Hello. How are you? I know you, I knew you, I think I can remember your name. I’ve had a pretty eventful seven days, and I’m slowly remembering the unfortunate side-effect of writing for a living. Put simply, you just don’t feel like coming home and writing some more. This is take two of the column for this week as well. I got two new albums on Tuesday, and I thought I’d split them up over this week and next week, so I picked one – Semisonic’s All About Chemistry – to write about this time. It was a good plan, but it hit a sizeable snag.

I have nothing whatsoever to say about Semisonic’s All About Chemistry.

Oh, it’s not a bad record, it just doesn’t seem to inspire the flowing verbiage. Hence, I’ve scrapped take one with the intention of ruminating all this week on Semisonic and getting back to it. This leaves the second of the two records, Our Lady Peace’s Spiritual Machines. Nothing else even remotely interesting has come out or has happened in the world of music lately to fill this column, so here we go…

Our Lady Peace is one of the only bands I know that I like immensely for almost no reason. Ninety percent of their charm comes from lead singer Raine Maida, and I can’t really put my finger on why I dig him, either. His voice is an odd combination of Billy Corgan, Alice Cooper, Jonathan Davis and Rufus Wainwright, yet somehow it works. His whining, acrobatic warble is completely idiosyncratic and yet totally appealing in an indescribable way. This is a good thing, since it’s his band’s one remarkable strength.

Our Lady Peace has never felt the smiling gaze of fame, and for once there’s a pretty good reason for that. The band is sturdy, steady, tight and utterly faceless. They’ve always hawked the brand of heavy-guitar alt-pop that made bands like Everclear famous, and their songwriting has always been just this side of really good. They had a pair of pseudo-hits from their second album, Clumsy, namely the title tune and “Superman’s Dead,” and I’m betting that’s as close as they’ll ever come to mass exposure.

Thing is, I can’t pan them, either. There was nothing wrong with their third album, Happiness Is Not a Fish That You Can Catch, except the asinine title. They play with textures that augment their typical crunchy rock well, and of course, they have Maida singing for them. I can’t say that I haven’t liked anything they’ve done, even though I’d never recommend them as a sterling group of musicians. They’re too typical.

That typicality has plagued this band from the start, and on their fourth album, they’ve taken some steps to shake it. Spiritual Machines is a futuristic concept album based loosely on Ray Kurzweil’s book The Age of Spiritual Machines, and it concerns mechanical beings developing emotions and fighting for basic human rights. (At least, that’s what the book’s about.) The songs are segued together with excerpts from Kurzweil, and the cover art is decidedly futuristic.

If all this is reminding you of Radiohead’s OK Computer, go to the head of the class. That album serves as the inspirational base for Spiritual Machines, and one could certainly do worse than to try to emulate the best record of the last eleven years. There’s just one tiny problem. Our Lady Peace are not even in Radiohead’s league. It would be impossible (and believe me, I’ve tried) to categorize Radiohead, or even succinctly describe their work. Our Lady Peace is an alternative rock band. Period.

Spiritual Machines doesn’t quite benefit from the space-age concept the band has forced upon it, but the theme doesn’t hinder the record, either. Honestly, you can just ignore it. The songs are only marginally connected to Kurzweil’s work. It feels like the band tried to shoehorn the concept onto a group of songs they’d already written. Sure, it works – “In Repair,” for example, could easily be about both emotional and mechanical breakdowns – but it’s not necessary.

Stripped of its pretensions, Our Lady Peace’s album is nothing more than another strong set of decent alt-rock. And again, there’s nothing wrong with it, but there’s nothing remarkable about it either. You’ll hum “Made to Heal” for about 10 minutes, and then you’ll forget it entirely. I’m looking at the track listing right now, and despite the fact that I’ve heard Spiritual Machines six times, I can’t remember anything about either “Middle of Yesterday” or “Everyone’s a Junkie,” except that I liked them while they were playing.

At times on this album, Our Lady Peace make small attempts to transcend their sound, most successfully on the concluding three tracks. “All My Friends” builds admirably over a suspended chord pattern, “If You Believe” stands out as the most memorable track with its piano-based chorus, and “The Wonderful Future” is a pleasant clean-guitar closer. None of them really rise above the alt-rock stigma, but the effort is appreciated.

As I said at the beginning of this review, the real reason to listen to Our Lady Peace is Raine Maida. Like Jon Davis (of Korn), Maida is completely unafraid of his own voice. He wields it, sending it to stratospheric heights with stunning confidence. He also extends that confidence like a forcefield, covering the rest of the band. With any other singer, Our Lady Peace might be intolerably boring, but Maida makes it almost impossible to dislike them.

For example, take “Are You Sad,” one of the album’s best tracks. The chorus lyrics are the epitome of trite: “Are you sad? Are you holding yourself? Are you locked in your room? You shouldn’t be…” The music is sweet and textured, but it’s Maida’s falsetto delivery that carries the tune. Try to imagine, say, the guy from Bush trying to sell that song, and when you’re done laughing, you’ll appreciate Maida’s contribution. Our Lady Peace is lucky to have him.

There’s very little to set Spiritual Machines apart from a slew of alt-rock albums available in your local record store. (As a quick side note, the one wretched song, “Life,” is naturally the first single.) Still, the last three songs hold out some hope that, record company willing, they might one day release something that rises above the guitar-drenched mire they’ve been in since the beginning. While it’s not a bad effort, Spiritual Machines isn’t it.

Next week, I’ll try to coalesce my thoughts on All About Chemistry. Now shut the computer off and go rent Almost Famous. There could be 50 bucks in it for you. But I doubt it.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

Thought I wouldn’t make it, didn’t you? It’s still Wednesday by about 20 minutes…

Okay, first up, some random notes about album titles. Everyone seems to be changing their minds lately. First Radiohead decided to give up on that Kid A – Kid B thing and call their new one Amnesiac. (It hits on my birthday, June 5, and would make an ideal gift, hint hint…) Now word has come down that Tool’s new one, slated for April 17 and originally titled Systema Encephale, is now called Lateralus. (I liked the old title better. It was like getting two non-words for the price of one.)

Also changed is Bjork’s album, ready to come out on May 22. It was Domestika, and now it’s called Vespertine. Either way, it should be excellent. Finally, even though it’s not a change, I wanted to mention that John Mellencamp, who stubbornly refuses to die, has wonderfully titled his new one Kiss My Mule. It’s between that and Amy Ray’s Stag for best album title of the year so far.

The title can tell you a lot about a record. For instance, from the name of Aerosmith’s new one, Just Push Play, you might expect some generic pop-rock without a lot of imagination, and you’d be right. I don’t want to spend a lot of time on it, because it’s a huge backslide from their last one, Nine Lives. Still, for a band whose collective age is right around 250, it ain’t all bad.

On the other hand, from the title of Duncan Sheik’s third album, Phantom Moon, you wouldn’t be remiss in expecting a hushed, acoustic album reminiscent of Nick Drake, and again you’d be right. This is the one I want to spent time on this week, though, because Phantom Moon is a lot more than a knockoff of Drake’s style. In fact, it’s my favorite album of 2001 so far.

Sheik’s always been more than the sum of his hits. His first album soared on the pop hooks of “She Runs Away” and “Barely Breathing,” which typed Sheik as a writer of literate yet accessible radio tunes. If one delved deeper on that album, though, one could hear the first tentative steps of a wunderkind. Even “She Runs Away” is a nearly perfect pop number, combining a finger-picked acoustic style with a great melody. The album, though, decried the singles, remaining a somber affair throughout. It was a genuine mood album, and the singles didn’t seem to fit.

His second effort, Humming, attempted to inject more momentum. In fact, the first three songs on Humming (“In Between,” “Rubbed Out” and “Bite Your Tongue”) were the most rhythmically rocking tunes he’d produced. Sheik’s voice is a somewhat unsteady tenor that never seemed to sit well with his more rollicking material, and hence most of the second album is an ill fit. Humming also showcased his burgeoning talents as a songsmith, however, and hiding behind the hits on this one were meditations like the Jeff Buckley tribute, “A Body Goes Down.” It was a delicate balancing act between pop sensation and serious artist, and Sheik seemed to be growing more adept at it.

Until now.

Phantom Moon is full-on artistry. It’s a gorgeous, accomplished work that makes no concessions to AOR format radio programmers or sales figures. It’s such a hit-free collection that Atlantic refused to release it. Hence it’s out on Nonesuch Records, a tiny subsidiary of Warner Bros. (Isn’t everything a tiny subsidiary of Warner Bros., though?) It’s a disc that makes that rare leap from merely a set of songs to a complete album, one that is best listened to straight through. Preferably, in this case, by a roaring fire on a snowy Saturday evening with all the lights off.

Yeah, Phantom Moon sounds like Nick Drake. More than that, though, it captures the very essence of Nick Drake: that deep chill that begins at the base of your spine, the goosebumps that appear on the back of your neck when an artist decides to be so intimate with you, the listener, that you feel like you’re in the same room. Phantom Moon is hushed, somber, willowy and lighter than air, all at once. It takes more than a passing mimicry of Nick Drake’s acoustic style to get that mixture of emotions right. Duncan Sheik has finally got it right.

With one important exception, every instrument on Phantom Moon is acoustic. The guitar, of course, provides the web that holds it all together, but the sweet thump of acoustic bass is unmistakable, and the organic quality of a piano is impossible to emulate electronically. The album is structured in a wave, beginning with just a voice and a piano on “The Wilderness (Prelude),” which leads into “Longing Town,” one of the sparest songs here. Slowly, over the course of 25 minutes or so, Sheik adds instruments – piano on “Mr. Chess,” drums on “The Winds that Blow,” the full power of the London Session Orchestra on the amazing “Mouth on Fire” – until the buildup reaches full flower with “Far Away.” This song introduces the one plugged-in instrument, Bill Frisell’s terrific electric guitar, and though it remains subdued, it feels huge in context.

Then, slowly again, Sheik starts removing instruments. The last percussion on the album appears four tracks from the end, on the great “Mirror in the Heart.” He wraps it up with “The Wilderness” again, just piano and voice with subtle strings. The effect is like a journey. He starts off alone, meeting people one by one as he continues. One by one, though, they all disappear, and he reaches his destination alone once again.

The most striking aspect of Phantom Moon is the vocal work. Sheik, always more comfortable with the moodier material in his catalog, has chosen to go for intimacy at all costs here. He’s recorded his own vocals close and high, making one feel like he’s standing three feet away. The gutsiest move here is “Lo and Behold,” which Sheik sings almost entirely in a lovely falsetto. The unsteadiness that plagued his earlier vocals is all but gone, and even though he’s never tried something like this, he’s so dedicated to a particular sound that you can’t help falling in love with the effort. Sheik gets you so on his side that you’re rooting for him to perform the song flawlessly, and he comes through. It’s exhilarating.

Lyrics have always been Duncan Sheik’s Achilles heel, marring perfect melodies with banal sentiments. His smartest move on Phantom Moon was to turn the lyrical side over entirely to novelist Steven Sater. His poetry suits the music perfectly, and even though the subject matter remains familiar, the phrasing adds depth. Take this passage from “This is How My Heart Heard”: “I forgot the taste of fears, and how they haunt the lips you’re kissing, and how love’s just a waste of tears on someone who is missing.” It’s a vast improvement over “Oh, darling, don’t you know, the darkness comes and the darkness goes,” if nothing else. Plus, the hushed production makes even the sweetest lines melancholy and adds weight to even the slightest turn of phrase.

This is an important album for Duncan Sheik in a lot of ways. For one, he’s grown and matured as an artist here immeasurably. I can’t imagine the Duncan Sheik of five years ago producing anything like this. More importantly, though, he’s forsworn the simple pop life on this album, digging deeper in a real way for the first time. Phantom Moon is a glorious statement of purpose and the announcement of a serious musician. It’s an album that brings its own atmosphere into every room in which it’s played, and one that is instantly timeless.

There’s no doubt that Duncan Sheik is a fan of Nick Drake. Phantom Moon borrows the style and substance of Drake’s best work. Its true achievement, though, is in reflecting the soul and spirit of Drake, something that even the best imitators can’t do unless they really feel it. After spending a solid week with Phantom Moon, I feel confident in saying that were he alive today, Nick Drake would probably be just as big a fan of Duncan Sheik in return. That is an amazing thing, but Phantom Moon is an amazing record.

See you in line Tuesday morning.